Marshall looked relieved and also a little sick. We were betting so much on his gut instinct. If he was wrong . . . Still, his gut instinct had gotten us this far. I couldn’t see clearly past any moment where Marshall was wrong, so he wasn’t wrong, and that was all. Our course was set.

As we got up to leave, Trey said, “We should take your car. It has the base of Robert’s car seat.”

I nodded, moved to near tears by his implication. Taking the car-seat base was an act of such deliberate hope that it made me think of Kelly Wilkerson, with her past-tense verbs, her bare walls, her empty, indented carpet. Her son’s small life was over, and he was already wiped entirely away. She seemed almost wiped away as well. Trey was saying I would not become like her, just a body, too full of rage and drugs and grief to hold anything else. Trey was saying we were going to bring our son home.

Marshall got in the backseat, and I put a stack of dark blankets, gray and navy, in beside him. Trey drove. Once we were on the highway, I reached over the gap between the seats to hold his hand. He gripped mine so tight it almost hurt. We didn’t talk much on the drive. No need. We all knew the plan. It was crazy and thin and the only thing we had.

There was little traffic leaving Atlanta this early on a Sunday morning. People were either still in bed or at church. My mother had skipped her own service to let the girls sleep in. She’d forgotten to tell them to put their phones away when she went to bed, and she thought they’d stayed up late. I texted with her a little bit, sending cheery missives about my recovery. She was hoping to keep them long enough for pancake brunch before I came to take them back. I told her that sounded perfect. Both girls slept until eleven, sometimes noon, on weekends. This would all be over before they had so much as stirred.

Thinking of them, tucked up safe together in Mom’s guest room, sleeping in the boneless way of young and growing things, made me long for them, so fierce. I wanted to wake them myself and offer pancakes, smell their warm, sleepy skin and pet their tousled hair back. Their absence felt both normal and insane. They often spent weekends with my mom or with Trey’s parents, getting spoiled while Trey and I ducked out to the Biltmore or up to New York. Now, though, I felt as if a month had passed since I’d seen them, as if I’d abandoned them while focused solely on their brother. I wanted to make it up to them, though they had no idea that there was something to make up.